The Park County Clerk’s Office plans to switch to electronic pollbooks for next year’s elections, believing the change will slash wait times at the polls, reduce the workload for poll workers and help weed out ineligible, would-be voters.

“It’s just amazing how much more efficient it’s going to be for voters and for us as staff and people who run the elections,” said Clerk Colleen Renner.

At an Oct. 16 meeting in Powell, Renner and her staff said the digital pollbooks will help dramatically reduce the long wait times that local voters experienced at the Park County Fairgrounds during the 2024 general election.

The clerk attempted to move to “epollbooks” in early 2024, but the idea was met with some resistance from skeptics, including Sen. Dan Laursen, R-Powell. At that time, Park County commissioners effectively blocked the change by declining to provide an additional $60,000 worth of funding for the software, computers and other equipment.

However, commissioners approved the funding this year and Renner and her staff hosted a few public meetings that are intended in part to explain the digital pollbooks. Seven other counties already use them.

The switch will not impact the actual voting process: Election Day voters will still need to vote at their designated polling place and will continue to cast paper ballots as usual.

“We’re not moving to electronic voting. We’re not moving to vote centers,” First Deputy Clerk Hans Odde said at the meeting. “We are simply easing the check-in process itself.”

A solution to long waits?

The clerk’s office has traditionally used paper pollbooks, which are printed the night before Election Day. Each polling place gets a printout of the registered voters in that area, which are sorted by their last names into relatively equal chunks of the alphabet. Two election judges are then assigned to check-in voters from each segment, such as A-E or S-Z. The judges flip through the printed book to find each registered voter or, in the case of new voters, write in their name. They then identify the correct ballot and write the number down on a slip of paper.

But between the unpredictable nature of voter turnout and varying speeds of poll workers, some lines inevitably go faster than others.

While folks with some last names fared better, many of the 3,278 voters who cast their ballots at the fairgrounds on Nov. 5, 2024, stood in line for a couple hours. An unknown number left.

“Some people called and told me that they weren’t going to wait in line and that they turned around — they didn’t vote,” Elections Deputy Katie Johnson recalled, “and that, that was heartbreaking to me.”

Odde added that, earlier this month, a man called to request an absentee ballot for next year’s elections and explained that he couldn’t physically handle another two-hour wait.

The delays were unique to the fairgrounds, Odde said, in part because a higher percentage of Powell people voted on Election Day than voted early or absentee.

Among the 5,080 Powell area residents who participated in the 2024 general election, 64% of them — or 3,268 people — turned out at the fairgrounds.

In contrast, among the 5,380 City of Cody residents who voted in the election, only 1,988 of them, or about 37%, did so at the Cody Auditorium.

(Overall, about half the county’s 16,876 voters cast their ballots on Election Day.)

“With the paper pollbooks, falling behind early — because we had lines very early here [in Powell] in the morning — it contributed all day to the backup,” Odde said.

The clerk’s office is estimating that the electronic system will slash the wait to somewhere between five and 15 minutes, Johnson said.

“That way, everybody can vote any time of day, whatever is convenient for them,” she said.

Digital process

Instead of overseeing a paper book, each judge assigned to check-in will man a computer. That will allow judges to pull up a voter’s information by typing in their name or even their driver’s license number. 

At the fairgrounds, Odde said they plan to deploy eight judges at eight workstations that will each be able to serve voters with any last name.

The system makes it much less labor-intensive to reactivate or update a voter’s registration and automates the process of identifying a voter’s precinct and ballot style. Additionally, the epollbook software checks to see if new voters have a felony conviction or are U.S. citizens; if a voter doesn’t have a Wyoming driver’s license and provides a partial Social Security number, the system checks federal records to ensure their personal information matches up and isn’t, say, for a dead person.

“I know everyone here is concerned and we only want U.S. citizens voting in our elections,” Johnson said. “And this helps us to ensure that that is what’s happening.”

Odde noted that, under the paper system, election judges aren’t able to check a voter’s felony status in real time; that check only comes when the clerk’s staff manually enter registration forms into the system after the election. As a result, there have been a handful of instances in which felons who apparently haven’t had their rights restored have cast ballots in Park County; while those individuals can theoretically be prosecuted for illegal voting, there’s no way to remove the vote from the total.

“We see this as both a security and integrity piece to help us up our game when it comes to keeping Wyoming elections safe and secure,” Johnson said.

An online system

There were no explicit objections to epollbooks expressed by the roughly 20 attendees at last week’s meeting. However, one question touched on the biggest criticism of the technology: The fact that the electronic system relies on an internet connection, which opens up the potential of cyber threats.

The head of the county’s informational technology department, Andrew Guertin, said the computers at each polling place will be connected to a virtual private network that’s tied back to the Park County Courthouse.

And, Guertin said, “It’ll be just as secure as the computers that are physically sitting at the courthouse.”

After holding public meetings in Powell and Cody last week, the clerk’s office plans to host another at the Meeteetse Recreation Center from 6-7 p.m. on Nov. 6.